On March 3, 2021, World Trademark Review (WTR) featured comments from Justin Pierce, Andrew Price, and Rebecca Liebowitz on the development and deployment of the Trademark Prosecution and Counseling Group’s Wellbrand service, an innovative naming solution that leverages Venable’s trademark-law intelligence to accelerate the process of finding effective brand names.
The genesis of the offering came a number of years ago when the firm was advising a global consumer electronics company. Across a single year, over 500 potential product names provided by an advertising agency were searched, and more than 90% of them posed problems. Pierce told WTR that “in fast-moving and competitive industries, when it takes too long to ‘get to yes’ in brand or product name selection, corporate marketing teams often lose patience with the trademark screening processes traditionally imposed upon them.”
Price identified three main problems that can arise when marketing departments brainstorm names: “First, the names are not inherently distinctive. Second, they pose a significant risk of USPTO refusal and/or third-party challenge, which could be found in a preliminary search. And third, in some cases, the names have negative connotations clients may not immediately see.”
The Wellbrand service provides a way to quickly generate preliminarily cleared names. The offering combines “everything we have learned about the technical aspects of trademarks over many years in a busy global practice with the natural creative bent of some of our team members (made stronger by solving countless trademark problems over the years), plus some proprietary techniques,” said Price.
With the service already available to current clients, Liebowitz noted that – because of the way that it benefits from the guiding human hand – “the success (and efficiency) of the Wellbrand service is rooted in our team’s knowledge and understanding of the client’s own business practices, as well as its industry at large.”
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